The Analysis of Soils, whereof much was heard and whence much was hoped a few years since, seems to have fallen into utter discredit, so that every would-be popular writer gives it a passing fling or kick. That any analysis yet made was and is worthless, I can readily concede, without shaking in the least my conviction that soils will yet be analyzed, under the guidance of a truer, profounder Science, to the signal enlightenment and profit of their cultivators. Here is a retired merchant, banker, doctor, or lawyer, who has bought a spacious and naturally fertile but worn-out, run-down farm, on which he proposes to spend the remainder of his days. Of course, he must improve and enrich it; but with what? and how? All the manure he finds, or, for the present, can make on it, will hardly put the first acre in high condition, while he grows old and is unwilling to wait forever. He is able and ready to buy fertilizers, and does buy right and left, without knowing whether his land needs Lime, or Phosphate, or Potash, or something very different from either. Say he purchases $2,000 worth Of one or more of these fertilizers: it is highly probable that $1,500 might have served him better if invested in due proportion in just what his land most urgently needs; and I unflinchingly believe that we shall yet have an analysis of soils that will tell him just what fertilizers he ought to apply, and what quantity of each of them.
Science has already taught us that every load of Hay or Grain drawn from a field abstracts therefrom a considerable quantity of certain minerals--say Potash, Lime, Soda, Magnesia, Chlorine, Silica, Phosphorus--and that the soil is thereby impoverished until they be replaced, in some form or other. As no deposit in a bank was ever so large that continual drafts would not ultimately exhaust it, so no soil was ever so rich that taking crop after crop from it annually, yet giving nothing back, would not render it sterile or worthless. Sun and rain and wind will do their part in the work of renovation; but all of them together cannot restore to the soil the mineral elements whereof each crop takes a portion, and which, being once completely exhausted, can only be replaced at a heavy cost. Science teaches us to foresee and prevent such exhaustion--in part, by a rotation of crops, and in part by a constant replacement of the minerals annually borne away: the subtraction being greater in proportion as the crop is more exacting and luxuriant.
